Sure, when the law takes effect, they'll probably stop charging the rental fee. But they'll just replace it with some other fee, such as an "access fee". [That's what Dish Network did to me years ago. I had the choice of leasing their receiver, or connecting a receiver that I already owned. In the former case, they would charge me a monthly lease. In the latter case, they would charge me a connection fee which was equal to the lease amount.] Governments get in on this game, too. A few years ago my state of residence, Vermont, got into trouble for charging sales tax on purchases made out-of-state. So they simply renamed it a "use tax".

I bought a used electronic item though eBay. The listing said it was in proper working order. But when I received the item, it was not in proper working order. Not by a long shot. Interestingly enough, at several points during the transaction, I was prompted to purchase Square Trade coverage for the item, which I declined. I'm now convinced that the seller intentionally sold a defective item and I missed their "wink and a nod" to buy the Square Trade protection which would've allowed me to "upgrade" the used item to a new one.

Printers seem to be the worst offenders when it comes to planned obsolescence. In my experience the drivers are never updated. So the printer can only be used with whatever vintage of OS existed when the printer was first introduced. Have a printer that came out when Windows 7 was state-of-the-art? Good luck finding a Windows 10 driver for that same printer. I find this bizarre because printer makers probably make more money selling ink cartridges than they do on the printers themselves, so you'd think they'd have good reason to keep old printers alive in order to milk the cartridge revenue as long as possible.

The OP should go here: https://ocw.mit.edu/ Search "VLSI" and "ASIC", read everything that comes up and, after coming up to speed on a couple of graduate-level semester of study might be informed enough about the problem to ask a meaningful question.

TFA says the subject was successfully "placed in suspended animation". But, unless I missed it, TFA says nothing about whether or not the subject was successfully revived from suspended animation. That's like claiming success because you put a man on the moon, but failed to bring him home.

What? They aren't the upper-case Greek letters Delta, Omicron, Chi, and (possibly) Pi?

https://www.ancient.eu/img/r/p...

I, too, loved The Dish. IIRC, there is a funny scene where they've lost tracking of the capsule and they're all panicking that they're going to miss the video broadcast, and then they realize they just need to point the dish at the Moon to find it again. :)

Robot and Frank (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1990314) was a sweet movie with a bit of a twist ending. Well written and acted. Proof that not all science fiction movies have to be shoot-em-ups.

I'd never have watched it if not for the fact that, by mere chance, I heard a favorable review of it on NPR.

So we've established that photons pushing against (or bouncing off?) another object produce a force. Could it be that all the photons emitted from all of the stars in the universe hitting other space bodies is, at least partly, responsible for the expansion of the universe?

Should we expect any less of the company that designed the beautiful token ring connector?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

VB (I forget which version) on Windows95 was my first exposure to VB. It introduced me to GUIs, event-driven programming, and some OO concepts and constructs. I thought it was really cool.

Shortly after that, I started working at IBM where Lotus Notes was foisted upon. A peak under the hood revealed that Lotus products were propped up (or maybe burdened?) by a mountain of underlying LotusScript which is a close variant of VBScript (itself a variant of true VB).

But this made everything in Notes infinitely configurable. Having learned my way around VB, LotusScript was pretty quick to pick up. I wrote tons of customization to the various LN databases that I interacted with. Heck, I wrote a whole toolset from scratch in LotusScript that would synchronize my LN calendar and contacts with a Palm Pilot.

Sure, those prices sound ludicrous on an absolute scale. But they seem pretty comparable to the high-end professional SGI workstations from a few years ago.

My 2 teenage daughters watch everything with captioning turned on. I think it is borne of watching content on smart phones with the audio muted spilling over to watching content on the living room TV.

Furthermore, my wife and I are at the age where our hearing is not as good as it used to be, so we occasionally turn on CC to better understand the dialog without having to crank the volume to an uncomfortable level.

So, on average, CC is turned on > 50% of the time on the living room TV.

Rather that think about malicious intent, I prefer to interpret this question as: Despite our best efforts, what can still go wrong?

In that respect, I think the answer it "plenty".

The reason is that as we gain better-and-better understanding of how stuff works, we design in less-and-less safety margin. Eventually, someone's design point will cut it too close, something bad happens as a result, we learn about some previously unknown phenomenon, adapt our models, improve out safety margins, and move on.

I don't think it's so much a case of a scientist setting out to prove or disprove phenomenon "A" and being surprised by the result. It's that the process of proving/disproving "A" results in the accidental discovery of previously unknown phenomena "X", "Y", and "Z".